What is the difference between a Solved ticket and a Closed ticket?

Question

What is the difference between a Solved ticket and a Closed ticket?

Answer

Tickets are solved first and then after they maintained their solved status for a predefined amount of time, they are moved to closed. The major differences between solved and closed tickets are the following:

Solved tickets can be reopened and updated.

Tickets can be marked as solved by agents. Tickets marked as solved that are then responded by an end user reset to an open status.

Tickets in solved status, that are not closed by a trigger or automation, are automatically closed after 28 days, regardless of whether there have been updates to the ticket in that timeframe.

Closed tickets are locked. They cannot be reopened or updated in any way.

Tickets can be closed via a trigger or automation, but not by agents. Tickets marked as closed, then responded to by an end user create a new, follow-up ticket.

Zendesk Support comes with an automation called Close ticket 4 days after status is set to solved that gives end users four days to respond to a solved ticket before the ticket moves to closed status. You can set this automation to run anywhere between 1 hour and 28 days.

Best practice guidelines recommend that you leave a ticket in solved status for three to five days before moving to closed. This allows end users to re-engage with you on the same ticket. If you deactivate this automation, your solved tickets are set to closed by a system action (noted in your events and notifications as a 'batch close') after 28 days of inactivity in solved status.

After 120 days of being Closed, tickets are automatically archived (see Ticket archiving). Archiving tickets speeds up the loading time for views, especially those views that include multiple tickets which are closed for a long period of time (see Using views to manage ticket workflow).

38 Comments

Thanks for the feedback, Jay. I encourage you to add your voice and vote to this conversation in the Support product feedback topic in the community: [Remove the Auto System Closing of tickets at 28 days](Remove the Auto System Closing of tickets at 28 days)

I have tickets that are automatically solved.
I responded to a customer and hours after she responded but instead of bring reopened, the ticket was automatically solved after the customer has sent her reply.
Please help me fix this.

Is there a possible function to mark a ticket so it can be solved but won't close unless manually closed? We use zendesk and we have a certain type of customer/ticket that we want to solve once answered but they're projects that typically take a month or two to fully finish. Therefore having the ticket close automatically would mean that the project is spread over multiple Follow Up tickets which doesn't work well.

There may be a way to accomplish what you're looking for using a combination of automations and triggers. It's a bit of an odd setup so I hope you're ready!

First, if you only intend to manually close tickets for certain customers you will most likely want to tag these user profiles manual_close or a similar tag. That way we can make sure this automation only kicks in for those customers.

Once you have the appropriate profiles tagged you can then create an automation that looks for any ticket that contains this tag and is in a solved state and have that automation re-open that ticket. Here's a sample automation below:

You can then create a Trigger that will automatically set this ticket back to solved after it's been re-opened. Here's a sample trigger below:

Once you're ready to finally close the ticket you can create a Macro that applies a close_me_now tag to your ticket. You'll need to set up another Trigger that will auto-close these tickets since there's no Submit as Closed button. Here's what that trigger can look like below:

It's not pretty but it SHOULD get the job done. The other option would be to just submit these tickets as On-hold and then mark it as solved when the project is completed but it sounds like you're looking for the alternative.

Hopefully I didn't lose you there but let me know if you have any questions :)

It sounds like you may have a Trigger set up that may be altering the status of your tickets. Any chance you could check the events of the ticket to see if that's what's happening here? If you're unsure how to check the events you can find more information here.

I'm looking to better understand the behaviour of closed tickets as I'm doing some process admin which involves re-shuffling groups and users.

If I have closed tickets assigned to GROUP1/USER_A and I remove USER_A from GROUP1, what happens the the closed tickets? Obviously if the tickets are <closed theyhand over to me but seeing as you can't change or update closed tickets in any way, do they just stay stamped as GROUP1/USER_A?

Also, if I delete a group entirely which contains closed tickets, what happens to those tickets?